New Delhi, Sept. 17 -- May you live in interesting times," the oft-cited 'Chinese blessing or curse,' seems apt for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). America's AI majors want to slow this technology down amid safety concerns. US President Donald Trump wants to accelerate it to retain an edge over China, which is racing to make its own models useful and cheap enough to challenge Big AI's lead.

When Anthropic's chief Dario Amodei recently called for the industry to "pace the frontier" of AI development, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis backed the proposal of slowing down just enough to stay ahead of Chinese AI, as did SpaceX's Elon Musk. But Trump slammed it as a "sick conspiracy" against AI.

With AI-led hum...